Page 52 - Australasian Paint & Panel Magazine Sep-Oct 2019

Understanding Millennials
52
PAINT&PANEL SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2019
AUSTRALIAN MILLENNIALS
RETENTION
There are no guarantees, but two common misconceptions are that money and job perks will be enough to satisfy an employee. In fact, mon- ey is ranked third in the list of priorities for Millennials. Instead, employers should focus on training and feedback.
Lack of career development is the prime reason Millennials go job hunt- ing. They are more life-centric than work-centric, and if they feel they have plateaued they will go somewhere else to learn new skills.
In terms of feedback, this is often mistaken for praise. Millennials have grown up in a world where what they do gets an immediate response – largely through social media. That expectation follows them to work, and while they may not be seeking praise, they do demand a reaction. They don’t want to feel that their work has gone unnoticed. If they’re doing something good or bad, they want to know. Managers could adapt by re- placing annual reviews with regular, on-the-job comment.
CUSTOMERS
As customers, Millennials are also chang- ing the rules – particularly in the automo- tive sector. Environment is again a huge influencer. Urbanisation is a global, and seemingly irreversible trend. More than 70% of millennials live in cities where public transport is readily available.
Supporting this, a survey by KPMG found that 74% of executives at car manufacturers believe that more than half of current car owners wouldn’t necessarily want to buy another car. Millennials do not care about owner- ship as much as experience and con- venience. Sharing economy companies like Uber and Airbnb have taken ad- vantage of this change in mindset.
While owning a car used to be a sta- tus symbol, what matters more now is connectivity, a solution that makes their lives easier, and an experience that can be shared with friends. Quite simply Millennials want to get in, con- nect and go – hence, in part, the evolu- tion of car sharing, car clubs and sub- scription-based mobility services
Mark Hadaway is the former editor of the UK industry magazine bodyshop. While the transport trends mentioned are definitely reflected in Australia, the less mature public transport networks and travel distances from city suburbs to work hubs have seen Australian millennials adopting the car culture as they move out of city centres and start families. It’s not the cars themselves, but their prices, that drove the Net Generation away from motoring, according to GM’s global design boss Mike Simcoe. “Turns out millennials like cars, despite all the crap,” Simcoe says. “They were always there, but they couldn’t afford them.”
He says as millennials are ageing, and many now have families and live in suburbia, they have followed earlier generations into motoring. As it turns out, and time has moved on, millennials are showing the same sort of buying preferences as drivers from earlier generations. A recent study by Monash University with British and American Univesities found:
• Australian millennials are taking longer
to get a driver’s licence and using public
transport more.
• Melbourne and Brisbane have the highest
increases in transit kilometres travelled by young adults (18 to 30) of any major world city (45 per cent and 66 per cent, respectively).
• The car travel of young adults in London is declining the fastest (-47 per cent). Melbourne is steady at 4 per cent.
• Although auto travel by young adults in Brisbane increased slightly over time (16 per cent), auto kilometres travelled in Melbourne was almost the same as it was in the early 1990s. This may reflect the steady decrease in young
Victorians getting a driving licence, from 76
per cent in 2000 to 57 per cent in 2018.
• “At this rate, only half of 18 to 23-year-olds
in Melbourne will get a licence by 2025,” said Dr Alexa Delbosc, lead researcher and Senior Lecturer in Civil Engineering at Monash University.
• Findings showed transit use in Melbourne had increased 45 per centsince the 1990s, closely following significant increases in transit services delivered. The increases in transit use were greatest among low- income earners, but interestingly, parents
of young children also saw a strong increase in transit use over time.
“The greatest increase in transit services were investments in Melbourne’s high-frequen- cy SmartBus network,” Dr Delbosc said.
“We also saw big increases in train patron- age, reflecting strong growth in jobs and hous- ing in the city centre.”
Brisbane’s transit supply increased more than any other case study region, with a 40 per cent increase in service kilometres since the early 2000s when the city rolled out its bus rap- id transit network . This change is a key expla- nation for the significant increase in transit use among students.
“However, it appears that the transit supplied isn’t serving the needs of young adults in later life stages. Transit use in Brisbane shows the largest demographic gap of any case study, with students travelling 3862 more kilometres each year than parents of children,” Dr Delbosc said.
“There is little doubt that as millennials start to age and start their own families, they’re like- ly to adopt more car-oriented travel habits,” Dr Delbosc said.